and the other
ASUS
Intel® Pentium® dual-core processor E5500
4 GB DDR memory
1 TB HD
Didn't look at the graphics card.
But was looking at installing a 1GB NVidia and throwing in 4GB more to make it more comparable to the first. (This build even with the upgrades makes it a few hundred dollars cheaper than the first)

I'm looking to pick up the new 2011 package deal. The addition of motion builder and mudbox with all the cloth, fluid, and fur is looking too good to pass up!

At the moment I'm looking to max out at around 1500 to 2000 USD as I want to pick up the 2011 package deal.

I definitely want this to be able to render more complex scenes/ objects/effects as what I do continues to grow and expand.

All the memory is DDR3. I'm kind of (okay WAAAYYY behind) on what the difference is.

-GecT which two processors aren't exactly compatible?

As far as the bit rate and the type of core its running I'll have to check the store and get back to you guys with that. Those are the kind of things I wouldn't think to look for. Just doing a little research on the forums led me to look for something other than ATI just because many boardmembers have reported problems/unsatisfactory performance.

Ample video card memory is good for textures sets, if you look at the high end nvidia (and ATI) stuff you're looking at 1.5gb of memory minimum, more for the expensive cards.

As GecT noted, you also need to see how quickly the card can shift all this texture & poly information between the video processing unit and the memory on the card and the PCI bus. This is the transfer rate and the higher the bandwidth the more information you can shift. (the new Quadro 4000 can shift about 90 Gigabytes of info per second!! the 6000 can do 144GB/s! )Try for 256 bit or 384 bit as a minimum memory interface bandwidth.

For rendering, more cores (as fast as possible) + lots RAM is your friend. The core i7's are good at this, and has a very low latency memory interface! Data in quickly -> Data out quickly!

DDR is an older memory standard, mainboards that support phenom IIs use either DDR2 or DDR3.

You can get a good i7 system for that budget if you build it yourself but I know not everybody wants to get into that. The biggest problem I have with off the shelf rigs is that they have ONE component that is promoted and the details of all the other components are shrouded in mystery lol.

Dude,
I spent appx 700$ usd on mine, before i modded my case.
I have a AMD Athlon X4 2.8 gig processor.
Nvidia GTS 250 1 gig video card, 6 gigs of ddr3 ram ( Kingston 1066 i believe it was ) ( going to get 2 more gigs eventually)
running it all on a MSI 770-G45 mobo. Has 4 easy OC settings if you're into that sort of thing, where the Motherboard will set the computer up to overclock the cpu it you wish it, though i see no need wiht the current setup i have.
and I currently have a 650 watt power supply, though i am going to get a 800 watt modular psu soon and use this one a sa switched Desktop psu for Desk lighting issues. ( don't ask, i am heavy into modding everything. )

I am not a renderer by any means, but i know my old rig used to take about 1.5 hours to render one scene i had, with fg for lighting, now it renders in about 10 minutes,

also, Opened a model once, just to see how far i could push the card, and stared to subdivide it.. I was running over 2.5 million polys at 20 fps according to maya hud with no lag issues at all, and got tired of trying to lag it out.

And it calculates dynamics in a snap ( so far as i've tried anyway, and my old rig used to lag out and crash on the things i am doing now.)
The only thing i would change on my setup so far not mentioned above, is i would get AMD's Phenom II 3.5 Gig Quad core processor, the one with the 6 meg and 4 meg l3 cache .. that bad boy is lightning fast.

My advice, build my system save a crap load of money and still get 2011.
F.Y.I.
i could upgrade my psu, get the new CPU and also the extra 2 gigs of ram and spend just under 400$ to do it all, so even that is well within your price range.

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